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This story won 3rd place, nonfiction, in the New Mexican’s Holiday Writing Contest, 2006

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My husband, Ron has been attending Shivaratri at the Hanuman Temple in Taos for 17 years. Some years the road to Taos was icy, there was no cell phone reception and I would have to wait until he arrived home late the next day to know he was safe. When the kids were old enough to go, they returned with stories of chocolate — white and black — used in the ceremony, taking care of the fire outside, eating a sleepy breakfast in the morning and going to the hot springs on the way home. I went one year and felt the energy that coursed through the crowd of hundreds. A gentle force, warm and serious. I didn’t know what they were singing, but I sang along.

It was three days after Shivaratri when I received a phone call from a stranger named Leo. He carefully explained there had been an accident in Pilar, just outside of Taos. My husband was OK, he said, up and walking around, but had lost his phone and asked that I be called. They were taking him into the emergency room for tests.

We always wonder how we will act in an emergency. Looking back, I could best describe myself as being in a giddy state of shock. I didn’t ask for specifics—some unwritten code of ethics between the family at home and the strangers at the scenes of accidents, I suppose. I didn’t ask, Is he bleeding? Is anything broken? I didn’t ask, Is he crying? I did ask him to tell Ron that I loved him. It seemed so silly, so obvious, trite even. But nagging the back of my mind was the thought that it was possible that Ron was seriously hurt and that I wasn’t going to get the full details over the phone.

Before he hung up, Leo told me two things: the accident wasn’t Ron’s fault and unbelievably, no one was hurt.

“He must have been living a good life,” he said, “to have walked away from that.”

The one image in my mind was of the groceries Ron had just bought at Cid’s. We’d talked twice on the phone about what to get: the gomasio for my rice, organic fruit for breakfast, and vegetables for dinner. He shopped every week when he made his salsa and chile deliveries to Taos. Obliquely, I assumed those groceries were lost. Perhaps that was my way of focusing on something else. I actually had to force myself to remember how to drive the two hours to Taos.

It wasn’t until I was in Española that I heard Ron’s voice. I pulled into the Dairy Queen to talk on my cell phone. The white noise of the emergency waiting room didn’t obscure his soft tenor. He was already done; they’d X-rayed him and let him go.

When I got to Holy Cross Hospital I was amazed to see him sitting in a chair reading a paper. No bandages, only scratches on his knuckles and a piece of yellow straw embedded in the shoulder of his grey sweater. The only bloody spot was the taped cotton ball over the inside of his elbow where they’d stuck him for an IV. Later he would need chiropractic care. But then, I shook my head at him and smiled.

“Thank god for the seatbelt angel,” I said.

“I think Ralph Nader is an atheist,” he answered. I hugged him as he added, “It takes an atheist to make seatbelts.”

He wanted to do two things, he said: eat and visit the temple.

We took everything slowly, finding a café, parking, sitting at a table. He kept running into people he knew, and relating the story. Near the end of dinner, after he had recreated the sequence of events that caused him to swerve off the road and down an embankment, he had one more important moment to relive.

“At Shivaratri on Sunday,” he said, “the last watch, the one that goes from 2am to morning . . . I took a seat right at Hanuman’s feet, you know the statue?” I did. “It’s my usual spot. This time I felt so strong . . .” And he couldn’t finish his sentence.

“What were you thinking?” I asked. “When you started to roll, did you pray?”

He laughed and flicked away a tear, blowing his nose loudly into a napkin. “I thought, after the third or fourth time, is this ever going to end? I wasn’t counting. It was someone who saw the accident who told me how many times. I was just hoping nothing would come loose in back and hit me.”

We drove to the temple and got out. I watched as Ron walked into the hall and bowed. I looked at all the plants, green against the black night of the windows.

The next day, Ron drove back up to Taos to recover his books and phone from the totaled van. Later that evening I walked past the kitchen sink and saw a spaghetti squash, apples and oranges floating in water — chunks of salsa, tomatoes, cilantro and onion splattered over their bruised, scraped flesh. I had to turn away, the ripe smell of that torn fruit turning my stomach.

The next morning the food was in the drying rack, damaged, but all cleaned up. This fruit, I thought, went through the same experience that Ron went through. I picked up an apple, turning it in my hand. Dark brown bruises on every side, gouges a quarter of an inch thick, the organic sticker still in place. And he saved it; brought it home.

I took it to my desk where I could look at it all day and be thankful.

What does this moment feel like? It’s 1pm on a very sunny December day. I am sitting in a café called Java Joe’s in Santa Fe. Outside the plate glass windows, sheets of snow continue to occupy space in the northern shade of four ponderosa pines on a busy traffic corner. Inside the café the air is too warm. I scribble into a wire-bound notebook. On my table: a blue plate, spinach feta quiche crumbs, a crumpled white paper napkin.

This day is like any other day. The sound of dishes sinking down into deep water, refrigerator doors closing, the hiss of a cappuccino machine’s steam spigot, the soft tinkling of roasted coffee beans being poured from one container to another like a seashell waterfall. These sounds aren’t more distinct, more important than yesterday. But this day is unlike any other. This day I spoke the words, “my book agent.”

I just dropped off my manuscript copies of DIZZY SUSHI at the doorstep of a literary agent I met Friday. We shook hands. She emailed me a list of six editors at publishing houses. I looked over an agency contract for the first time. Tomorrow, DIZZY will be in the mail and in 6-8 weeks the first news will arrive. Acceptance? Rewrites? Rejections? An offer?

We don’t know if DIZZY will sell, (another new word in this context, “we”), but the idea is to get my name in front of editors so if DIZZY doesn’t win them over, we have at least started a dialogue when the next project comes to them.

I have said these words before—agent, editors, publishing houses—but now they stick. They’re real, actualized. Now there is a connection between them and me.

Remember records? LPs? A needle with a diamond tip carefully placed on the outer circumference of a rotating disc. It catches the first thread and a song begins. Before today the motion was there, the needle tip sharp, but the two weren’t meeting. Today, the outer edge of the publishing world and my creative intention have met and the beginning notes of music reverberate. A fitting end to a year-long blog about getting published, no?

My first post in January invited you to walk with me on this path and I am happy we have gotten here together. Your encouragement, interest, notes, and support have been an important piece of the whole. In you I have created an audience. I think of you when I write. And that has been one of the most important things I have discovered this year.

Are you ready for chapter two? We have climbed to the top of the canyon and stand on its lip looking out in all directions. Can you see the shape the river has cut into the rock? How it flows away to the south? I don’t know the path from here, but now we have a guide. Be assured: this is just the first step in possibly an even longer process. I, for one, am happy to have the company.

Yesterday as I began checking the pages of my ms, my hands had forgotten how to do it. It was almost 12 months ago that I last made so many copies of DIZZY. 332 pages were stacked in front of me, I had a rubber tip on the middle finger of my right hand and my left hand settled on top of the stack and I forgot the motions.

Then, as I leaned into the paper, my left hand curled over the top edges and caught them as they flipped by while I confirmed no page was missing. Like being handed a newborn baby, your arms remember the pose.

You can’t just drop a seed on the ground in northern New Mexico and expect it to grow; it takes lots of planning and intelligence to have a fruitful garden. You’d think something as organic as soil and water and soft green shoots would have nothing to do with flow rates and zone classification, but living in a high-altitude desert makes nature even more complex than it already is. And sometimes it feels like getting published is just as complicated.

I came home from the local xeric greenhouse with a box of parts to drip-irrigate just a tiny patch of land: 50 feet of ½” polyethylene tubing, 50 feet of ¼” micro tubing, hose connectors, 3-way layout tees, tubing holder stakes, a hole puncher, goof plugs for when you put the hole in the wrong place, and of course, an assortment of self-cleaning, pressure-compensating black plastic drippers. Oh, right: and plants.

Ducking in and out of greenhouses under stormy skies, I selected two oriental poppies (one blooming), a Russian sage, two creeping flowery things and catmint. All gallon buckets. My plan is to add these new babies to the spots outside my window where there are already a few suffering lilac bushes, a 2-foot tree of unknown origins, and a lot of hard-packed dirt and gravel.

First I opened the drip irrigation box and discovered something missing. Well, not exactly missing, but certainly not present. On the box is a picture of a grey and black “backflow adapter” under the print that says: INSIDE THIS BOX. But, then in parentheses, the model number with an additional letter “A.” The model I picked did not have an “A.”

Next we took the 50 feet of micro tubing out and stretched it from the spigot and across the walkway up the small grade to “the spot.” Too short. I sent dad back to the greenhouses in between his other errands to pick up more supplies. Meanwhile, I set the plants in their containers out in places where I can see them from my window, the orange floppy petals of the poppy like the soft ears of a friendly puppy begging me to come play.

Gardening like this feels like building the massive structure behind getting a simple story published. First there’s the writing of it, then the analyzing of the market, then the push-pull of rejections-sendings of the manuscript. Right now, DIZZY SUSHI is at an agent who requests exclusivity. Meaning I can’t send it to anyone else until she says yea or nea. If she says no, then it goes on to the next agent, also exclusively. So it’s a waiting game, and meanwhile I keystroke other stories, monologues, blogs.

The point of it all? Like gardening in the desert, you acquire the Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi: the appreciation of imperfection. (Because it’s quite perfect.) My black drip hose is stretching out under the stars tonight, held down by rocks, just inches away from its destination. And until I rake away the deadheaded Maximilion daises, dig holes, add compost, twist in the drippers and plug the goof holes, the black hose will be a reminder of possibilities. And that’s just perfect.